


litany in which everything is crossed out

by lyricsandhearts



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-11
Updated: 2013-05-11
Packaged: 2017-12-11 13:13:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/799122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricsandhearts/pseuds/lyricsandhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There's a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place — well then, game over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	litany in which everything is crossed out

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by the works of richard siken, written when i couldn't sleep after seeing the movie

iv. 

You will never write again.

This is the sad truth you face when your hands leave the typewriter for the final time, when you momentarily consider snipping every mention of Jordan from the fabric of your story and your life but can’t bring yourself to change a thing, when your finger traces gently over the word “GATSBY” on the cover page and you decide it isn't enough, it isn't ever enough: You will never write again. You have used up all your useful words, every single thing you could possibly want to say. Nothing else worthwhile will ever happen to you for the rest of your life, because you are a drunk and a maniac – it’s true, it’s diagnosed and it’s clinical – and you have lost everything.

The past can repeat itself. Somebody said this.

You have no mistakes left to make.

iii. 

He has blue eyes and you wanted to sleep with him; he _had_ blue eyes and then you just want to sleep near him, near his body, which isn't asleep but close enough, because his eyes are closed and you've never seen him sleeping so it could look like anything. Anything at all.

Nobody comes around anymore. Nobody comes because you have a fire in your eyes and a sharp, desperate edge in your voice and a buzzing in your ears and you’re still sleeping on the stairs. Nobody comes because Tom and Daisy are gone, because you never loved Jordan enough to ask her and she never loved you back, because you haven’t shaved or showered in days, because nobody cared about Jay Gatsby at all, not the way you do, and the funny thing is you thought everybody did.

He had blue eyes, before they closed, but they’re probably still blue, they probably haven’t changed even though you can’t see them. Maybe you have a fever. Maybe he doesn't even have eyes anymore. Maybe you’re going to vomit if you keep looking at his face like this. Maybe his eyes are on that billboard now; maybe they were his all along.

If a man falls in the water and no one is around to hear him, does he still bleed out until the whole pool is the same sickly red-orange that used to live in his veins? If another man falls on the concrete and Nick Carraway is hanging by a cord on the phone and in his own head, sitting still and screaming like he’s never tried to run in his life, does anything in the world make a sound?

You could've drowned in those eyes, you think, rolling over on the stairs, staring down through the bars of your self-imposed prison towards the open casket. You could've drowned in that pool. Could've drowned in it regardless of any damn bullet. So it’s summer. So it’s one man with a gun in his hand, in his mouth, and another with a gun in his plans. So you’re helpless to sleep and drowning in your own blood at the bottom of a pool.

Salt in the wound, they say. Salt in the water. Sorry about the blood in your pool, wish it was mine.

Salt in the wound. 

(Whose wound is it, really?)

ii. 

“We – I – we need you.”

There are a lot of things you could have said that very first night: Dear Mr. Gatsby, terribly sorry I couldn't come to your party. Dear Gatsby, sorry I came to your party and had no clue what to do when the fireworks lit up at the very mention of your name, when the crescendo of my futile existence hit at a moment for which I could have done nothing to prepare nor recover.

There are a lot of things you could say right now: I don’t need you. I need you more than I could ever say. I know you want this but there are other ways to go about it, Gatsby. I will be with you every step of the way. What are you trying to do, here, exactly?

But you know. You know what he’s trying to do here. He just wants a better story. Who wouldn't?

The life of Jay Gatsby is larger and stranger than any life you think anyone has ever lived, before or after. It’s terrifying and it’s captivating; to watch him is a lonely and a sad thing. To know that he has tried so hard and come so far and he will still almost, _almost_ admit to needing you, it’s – it’s incredible. You shouldn't feel this way, but it’s incredible.

You are the most pathetic person you can imagine.

He’s building her a city out of the scraps he’s gathered, out of silver and dirt and gold and blood, and it makes your stomach twist to watch it. This is not the way things are supposed to be and he will not accept it. He changed the moment he saw her and he cannot accept that he will change again the moment she walks out of his life for good.

He’s building her a city and he’s calling it paradise, he’s calling it home. Home is where the heart is and where Tom Buchanan is not. Home is where the heart is and you wonder if sometimes Gatsby doesn't think his own heart might be hollow, might never have been there at all, and that’s why he tries so hard to win her back, so he can feel anything, something he felt before, anything. Your own heart is full of – of a light unequivocal. The light is not guaranteed to be on at any given moment, but it’s always there at least, and if it would help him be happy, god, would you let him take that away from you. He deserves the light. He deserves something, at least.

i. 

Ideas are stupid things to fall in love with but you think maybe you fell in love with the idea of him the moment he said his own name, or maybe the moment you realized he was only a man. Barely a man, in fact – a child, almost, a child who can’t stand the idea of not getting his own way, who doesn't want to share, who wilts at real conflict and just wants, more than anything, to be liked by as many people as he can manage, and loved by the one person he can’t let go.

It frightens you utterly and deeply that all this is suddenly endearing to you.

vi. 

A man takes his sadness down to the water and drowns it, drowns it all, but then you’re still left with the pool.

vii. 

Gatsby is dead and you are dead too. This is the first time these words have made it out your mouth. It is the last time they ever will.

Sometimes you wake up in the morning thinking about the smile, thinking about the fireworks that weren't yours to watch, thinking about the hundred different things he was to a hundred different people all at once and wondering how he could have done it. Jay Gatsby is a mystery to you. He will always be a mystery to you, but less to you than anyone else. You imagine that you understand him better even than you think you do.

You can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t fix things because there’s nothing left to fix and you won’t say it but he’s still dead, always dead, dead no matter how many times you visit his grave, dead no matter how much your hands sweat when the doctor reads the book all the way through for the first time and you sit in front of him for hours, still if not for the constant twitching, the bouncing leg.

It does not come to an end; nothing comes to an end. You cannot say you've outgrown him because there’s no such thing as outgrowing, there’s only moving on, and you couldn't move on even if you tried. You are dead, but you will keep going. You are dead, but you are not.

You stole this ring off his hand before he was buried. Payment, you think. Suppose it’s compensation enough and he won’t be needing it anyhow.

You will be needing it.

You never can get him to kill you, but you wear that ring for the longest time.


End file.
